I'm going to apologize in advance if I get a little mystical and introspective with this nomination. I blame "Myriad Harbor" by The New Pornographers, a song I've been listening to pretty much nonstop since I got the CD last week. So you might find this article most enjoyable if you play that song while you read this:
My introspection has a cause. As I sat down to write this, I thought I'll talk up Rock Candy. Then I instantly changed my mind. Before I even typed a letter something popped unbidden into my mind and replaced "Rock Candy" as The Best Candy That Is Basically Just Sugar.
I should not be thinking about candy right now. I should not be thinking about eating, since I just finished my lunch and my lunch included a German chocolate brownie thick and rich enough that it could sustain me for weeks. It was the kind of thick and rich brownie that feels heavy when you pick it up, and you know that chewing it is going to be kind of a task, a bit of a chore because it's so thick and so rich, but it's the kind of chore you don't mind.
This particular brownie was also the fourth in a set of five that Sweetie and I bought as snacks on Friday, and brought home to share with everyone. Only nobody but me likes them. I like them because they are chocolatey and rich and full of nuts and maple and caramel swirls and frosting and more nuts and jimmies and in general are packed full of goodness. I like things like that. My motto is the more stuff you can cram into a dessert the better that dessert is.
I should not be thinking about candy right now. I should not be thinking about eating, since I just finished my lunch and my lunch included a German chocolate brownie thick and rich enough that it could sustain me for weeks. It was the kind of thick and rich brownie that feels heavy when you pick it up, and you know that chewing it is going to be kind of a task, a bit of a chore because it's so thick and so rich, but it's the kind of chore you don't mind.
This particular brownie was also the fourth in a set of five that Sweetie and I bought as snacks on Friday, and brought home to share with everyone. Only nobody but me likes them. I like them because they are chocolatey and rich and full of nuts and maple and caramel swirls and frosting and more nuts and jimmies and in general are packed full of goodness. I like things like that. My motto is the more stuff you can cram into a dessert the better that dessert is.
Which makes my love of rock candy, the candy I was going to nominate for this category, all the more strange. Rock candy is nothing, really. It's just sugar and water and a little string and time. If rock candy were a math problem it would be:
sugar + water + time + string = delicious.
Also, if rock candy were a math problem, I would have paid more attention in math. Or, if rock candy were a science problem, I might have paid more attention in science.
Rock candy is, after all, a science problem. It's a science problem for me, anyway, because I can't figure out how to make it at home. I always thought I was supposed to be able to make it by putting a bunch of sugar and water into a jar and dipping a string with a knot through it into that mixture and then putting it in the dark and then going back a while later, maybe days, maybe months, and having delicious rock candy. But all I ever got was a wet string and stale sugar water.
Then I find out that I'm supposed to be boiling it and then wetting the string and then drying it, and a whole lot more, and it still doesn't work.
What good is having candy you can grow yourself if you're unable to grow it yourself?
Candy that is basically just sugar occupies a key niche in our lives. A small niche, but a key one. (And, I suppose, any niche is a small niche, right? If it was a larger space, we wouldn't refer to it as a "niche." We'd call it a space, a slot, a portion -- anything but a niche. So I apologize for being redundant.)
The key niche that "Candy That Is Basically Just Sugar" occupies in our life is this: celebratory candy/candy that parents hate and fear.
It's the former of those two that makes me love Rock Candy, and the latter that makes Rock Candy not the nominee in this category.We use "Candy That is Basically Just Sugar" to celebrate key points in our life, and to make parents worry about our teeth or, God forbid, our lives.
Cotton candy is sold at circuses, state fairs, and now movie theaters -- so if you're eating cotton candy, the odds are that you are having a good time and also that you are not very far from a corn dog.
Rock candy is sold at the kinds of candy stores that people only go to on vacations, those giant candy stores like you see in the Wisconsin Dells and Orlando, Florida, and other vacation sites, where you buy candy by the bag and can get gummi things that don't exist anywhere else.
We once bought gummi octopi on a vacation. (That was a good vacation.) So if you're eating rock candy, you probably are staying at a hotel with continental breakfast and your days are filled with swimming pools, picking out t-shirts of the place you've been swimming in, and bags of rock candy brought back to your hotel room late at night. And roller coasters. Every vacation I've been on as an adult has involved roller coasters. It's sort of my thing.
Candy That Is Basically Just Sugar is associated with stuff like that. "Rock candy" and "Cotton Candy" are distinguished members of this group.
Or, most Candy That Is Basically Just Sugar is. Not all; there are, beyond Rock Candy and Cotton Candy, things like "Lik-M-Aids."
I never truly understood the appeal of "Lik-M-Aids." I thought the candy companies weren't even really trying anymore. It's one thing, really, to package up sugar in a fancy way, like rock candy or cotton candy. That's sugar that you did something to to make us want to buy it. But "Lik-M-Aids" were just a candy stick that you licked and then dipped into a packet of sugar and licked the sugar off of. It felt like I was doing the work for them, like when you buy something that you have to shake up. Why can't they shake it at the factory? Or when you get those packages of "snack mix" that are 90% pretzels, 10% 'snacks' only the snacks are all the broken, misfit Doritos. In a household filled with teenagers, I'm more than familiar with what happens to the last 1/3 of the chip bag; what happens is that it's converted to crumbs by being repeatedly opened and closed and carried downstairs to be set on the couch and then stuffed under the couch until Mom finds it and makes you put it away, so that when I go to get a chip, I get fragments and powder. That's what you get in the "snack mixes" they sell, only with a billion more pretzels.
Lik-M-Aids were a step below the gauzy, spun wonderfulness of Cotton Candy, or the glamorous, diamond-like crunchiness of rock candy, both of which delivered the same unadulterated power of plain sugar but did so with a little class and flair. A big part of food preparation is presentation. Spinning the sugar around a cardboard cone and coloring it is presentation. Lik-M-Aid didn't have that at all.
But Lik-M-Aid at least had the candy stick, so it, too, was one step above Pixie Sticks. While Cotton Candy and Rock Candy are the celebratory, fun, members of "Candy That Is Basically Just Sugar," Pixie Sticks are the part that taught parents how to teach us fear.
Pixie Sticks don't even bother with the candy stick to dip; they're just straws full of sugar that you tear open and suck into your mouth. As candy, Pixie Sticks represent the lowest possible effort on the part of the candy maker. The only way Pixie Sticks could get any easier for the candy maker to sell would be if they somehow got us to agree to come to their factory and stick our heads under the sugar spigot so that the manufacturer wouldn't even have to bother putting them into the straw and shipping them out.
They're probably working on that, even as we speak, planning "Pixie Stick Vacations" where whole families could come to "Pixie Stick Land" and as part of their vacation package, spray some sugar directly into their mouths and then go spend even more money.
Because of the lack of effort, I would apply to Pixie Sticks the same lack of respect I give to "Lik-M-Aid" but for one thing: I am both traumatized and tantalized by Pixie Sticks because of serial killers that live in the suburbs.
When I was a kid we lived in the suburbs and Trick-Or-Treat on Halloween lasted hours and we'd cover the whole neighborhood -- hundreds of houses in our neat little suburb filled, in my mind, with people who were just like us, but filled, in my parents' minds, with people who had a stack of bodies of little kids in their basement and were looking to add to them.
As kids, we were constantly warned of the mostly-imaginary dangers that accompanied Trick-Or-Treat, and the biggest mostly-imaginary danger was tampered candy. This was before police departments would offer to x-ray candy for you, before community parties and trick-or-treating at the mall. The only protection we had against candy tamperers back then was our own vigilant parents, parents who were well versed in the dangers of the candy-tampering psychopathic behaviors of their neighbors and who were cautious enough to warn us about all the ways our neighbors were presumed to be trying to kill us through the candy they were so handing out in such a seemingly-friendly way. They'd spend hours lecturing us about razorblades in apples, pins in Snicker bars, and, above all, poisonous powders in Pixie Sticks.
I'm not sure why Pixie Sticks were deemed so dangerous, but they were; they were always at the top of the list of potentially-tampered candy. We were forbidden to eat them, forbidden in such a harsh way that if we were at a house and were given Pixie Sticks, the house was burned in our memories as harboring the worst kind of people -- yes, worse even than the people down the street who had a Christmas tree with blinking lights -- and we'd run, quickly, away, with the Pixie Sticks in our bags or plastic pumpkins, possibly tainting the other candy just by touching it.
We looked on with horror as other kids ate their Pixie Sticks, pouring the sugar into their mouth heedlessly. Even if they survived, we couldn't be sure that ours were safe because isn't that the way psychos worked? Tamper only with some so that we wouldn't ever be sure?
That's the world I grew up in: a world where innocent candy straws were actually harbingers of death. As a result, I was 19 before I ever ate a Pixie Stick.
I remember the first one I ever had. I bought it at a candy store out of curiousity. I picked it up and paid for it, with other candy, watching the guy behind the counter to see if he had a wicked smile or a gleam in his eye. Why couldn't, after all, a candy store owner be just as interested in killing me as my neighbors had been when I was young? But he seemed okay, so I paid and went outside and ripped the top off and ate it, pouring the sugar down my throat.
I'm still here, so you know it was okay. Unless it was really slow acting...
See? That fear never really leaves you.
There's really no reason, in the end, that I should like Pixie Sticks, and every reason that I should not. I was raised to believe that Pixie Sticks were certain signs of death, tiny paper straws filled with anthrax or some other unnameable poison. They were a candy that in its very innocence and simplicity and lethality summed up how my parents, and hence I, felt about the suburbs, which were also innocent and simple and lethal, apparently. I was ordered to turn them over and never ever ever eat them, and I did that faithfully every year I trick-or-treated, staying the heck away from Pixie Sticks until that day when I was 19.
Even then, as an adult, there was no reason I should have liked Pixie Sticks. By then my tastes had become more mature; assuming, of course, that "mature" is a synonym for "needing pretty much everything but the kitchen sink thrown into the mix." Plain things did not interest me anymore. Vanilla ice cream? Pleh. Chocolate Cake? Throw in some walnuts and M&Ms and maple frosting and fudge swirl, and maybe we'll talk then. I am the person who invented the idea of putting caramel corn on Blue Moon Ice Cream.
Don't knock it until you try it.
Somehow, though, my tastes bent around those two poles, like polarizing light through a prism, and focused in on Pixie Sticks... pure sugar in a paper straw: plain sugar in a paper straw. Dangerous potential poison in a paper straw.
When I started writing this, I was full to the gills with brownie and ready to write a quick essay on how great Rock Candy is and how hard it is to make and I'd probably have found some significance in that. But out of the blue, Pixie Sticks jumped to the foreground and I couldn't get them out of my head.
I think it's because Pixie Sticks are both biblical and the antithesis of everything about me. They are biblical because they are forbidden fruit: You can eat all of the candy, my parents would say but stay away from paper straws of sugar. I was better than Adam and Eve; I took a lot longer to give in to temptation, but eventually, you're going to give in, right? If someone tells you not to think of elephants, you'll think of elephants --
...as you're doing right now...
-- and if someone tells you not to eat Pixie Sticks, you'll eat Pixie Sticks. You may wait 19 years, but you'll eat them.
Maybe, in the end, my love of complicated foods, my love of cramming more and more flavors into what I was eating, of having a chicken sandwich with liverwurst as a topping, was the direct result of Pixie Sticks and what they represented. Maybe, in the end, I was afraid not just of Pixie Sticks but of what they represented: their simplicity, their lack of complication, standing in for my childhood, when I was simple and uncomplicated and so was life -- on its surface. Because if Pixie Sticks were simple/uncomplicated/deadly, then what of my childhood? Was my childhood, were my memories, was my whole life simple/uncomplicated/deadly?
Seen from that perspective, then, it's clear to me that my entire adult life was an effort to distance myself from the potential danger exemplified by the simple and uncomplicated. From desserts with three toppings to law school, my every action was aimed at distancing myself from the simple because to be simple was to be dead. Even the "simple" candy I picked for this category was amazingly complex -- it wasn't just sugar and water. There's all kinds of steps and science involved in Rock Candy. In everything I did, as I grew up, I piled on layer and layer of complexity to make sure that I moved away from simple, moved away from dead.
Then, at the last minute, my subconcious reared up, making me select Pixie Sticks as a subconscious way of telling me: it's okay to be simple. It's okay to be plain. Maybe that's why Pixie Sticks suddenly popped into my mind as I began to write this. Maybe my mind is crying out to me that I should decomplicate my life, that I should step back, that I should recapture some of the innocence that my life has lost...
... that, or Pixie Sticks just taste really good.
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Lik-M-Aids were a step below the gauzy, spun wonderfulness of Cotton Candy, or the glamorous, diamond-like crunchiness of rock candy, both of which delivered the same unadulterated power of plain sugar but did so with a little class and flair. A big part of food preparation is presentation. Spinning the sugar around a cardboard cone and coloring it is presentation. Lik-M-Aid didn't have that at all.
But Lik-M-Aid at least had the candy stick, so it, too, was one step above Pixie Sticks. While Cotton Candy and Rock Candy are the celebratory, fun, members of "Candy That Is Basically Just Sugar," Pixie Sticks are the part that taught parents how to teach us fear.
Pixie Sticks don't even bother with the candy stick to dip; they're just straws full of sugar that you tear open and suck into your mouth. As candy, Pixie Sticks represent the lowest possible effort on the part of the candy maker. The only way Pixie Sticks could get any easier for the candy maker to sell would be if they somehow got us to agree to come to their factory and stick our heads under the sugar spigot so that the manufacturer wouldn't even have to bother putting them into the straw and shipping them out.
They're probably working on that, even as we speak, planning "Pixie Stick Vacations" where whole families could come to "Pixie Stick Land" and as part of their vacation package, spray some sugar directly into their mouths and then go spend even more money.
Because of the lack of effort, I would apply to Pixie Sticks the same lack of respect I give to "Lik-M-Aid" but for one thing: I am both traumatized and tantalized by Pixie Sticks because of serial killers that live in the suburbs.
When I was a kid we lived in the suburbs and Trick-Or-Treat on Halloween lasted hours and we'd cover the whole neighborhood -- hundreds of houses in our neat little suburb filled, in my mind, with people who were just like us, but filled, in my parents' minds, with people who had a stack of bodies of little kids in their basement and were looking to add to them.
As kids, we were constantly warned of the mostly-imaginary dangers that accompanied Trick-Or-Treat, and the biggest mostly-imaginary danger was tampered candy. This was before police departments would offer to x-ray candy for you, before community parties and trick-or-treating at the mall. The only protection we had against candy tamperers back then was our own vigilant parents, parents who were well versed in the dangers of the candy-tampering psychopathic behaviors of their neighbors and who were cautious enough to warn us about all the ways our neighbors were presumed to be trying to kill us through the candy they were so handing out in such a seemingly-friendly way. They'd spend hours lecturing us about razorblades in apples, pins in Snicker bars, and, above all, poisonous powders in Pixie Sticks.
I'm not sure why Pixie Sticks were deemed so dangerous, but they were; they were always at the top of the list of potentially-tampered candy. We were forbidden to eat them, forbidden in such a harsh way that if we were at a house and were given Pixie Sticks, the house was burned in our memories as harboring the worst kind of people -- yes, worse even than the people down the street who had a Christmas tree with blinking lights -- and we'd run, quickly, away, with the Pixie Sticks in our bags or plastic pumpkins, possibly tainting the other candy just by touching it.
We looked on with horror as other kids ate their Pixie Sticks, pouring the sugar into their mouth heedlessly. Even if they survived, we couldn't be sure that ours were safe because isn't that the way psychos worked? Tamper only with some so that we wouldn't ever be sure?
That's the world I grew up in: a world where innocent candy straws were actually harbingers of death. As a result, I was 19 before I ever ate a Pixie Stick.
I remember the first one I ever had. I bought it at a candy store out of curiousity. I picked it up and paid for it, with other candy, watching the guy behind the counter to see if he had a wicked smile or a gleam in his eye. Why couldn't, after all, a candy store owner be just as interested in killing me as my neighbors had been when I was young? But he seemed okay, so I paid and went outside and ripped the top off and ate it, pouring the sugar down my throat.
I'm still here, so you know it was okay. Unless it was really slow acting...
See? That fear never really leaves you.
There's really no reason, in the end, that I should like Pixie Sticks, and every reason that I should not. I was raised to believe that Pixie Sticks were certain signs of death, tiny paper straws filled with anthrax or some other unnameable poison. They were a candy that in its very innocence and simplicity and lethality summed up how my parents, and hence I, felt about the suburbs, which were also innocent and simple and lethal, apparently. I was ordered to turn them over and never ever ever eat them, and I did that faithfully every year I trick-or-treated, staying the heck away from Pixie Sticks until that day when I was 19.
Even then, as an adult, there was no reason I should have liked Pixie Sticks. By then my tastes had become more mature; assuming, of course, that "mature" is a synonym for "needing pretty much everything but the kitchen sink thrown into the mix." Plain things did not interest me anymore. Vanilla ice cream? Pleh. Chocolate Cake? Throw in some walnuts and M&Ms and maple frosting and fudge swirl, and maybe we'll talk then. I am the person who invented the idea of putting caramel corn on Blue Moon Ice Cream.
Don't knock it until you try it.
Somehow, though, my tastes bent around those two poles, like polarizing light through a prism, and focused in on Pixie Sticks... pure sugar in a paper straw: plain sugar in a paper straw. Dangerous potential poison in a paper straw.
When I started writing this, I was full to the gills with brownie and ready to write a quick essay on how great Rock Candy is and how hard it is to make and I'd probably have found some significance in that. But out of the blue, Pixie Sticks jumped to the foreground and I couldn't get them out of my head.
I think it's because Pixie Sticks are both biblical and the antithesis of everything about me. They are biblical because they are forbidden fruit: You can eat all of the candy, my parents would say but stay away from paper straws of sugar. I was better than Adam and Eve; I took a lot longer to give in to temptation, but eventually, you're going to give in, right? If someone tells you not to think of elephants, you'll think of elephants --
...as you're doing right now...
-- and if someone tells you not to eat Pixie Sticks, you'll eat Pixie Sticks. You may wait 19 years, but you'll eat them.
Maybe, in the end, my love of complicated foods, my love of cramming more and more flavors into what I was eating, of having a chicken sandwich with liverwurst as a topping, was the direct result of Pixie Sticks and what they represented. Maybe, in the end, I was afraid not just of Pixie Sticks but of what they represented: their simplicity, their lack of complication, standing in for my childhood, when I was simple and uncomplicated and so was life -- on its surface. Because if Pixie Sticks were simple/uncomplicated/deadly, then what of my childhood? Was my childhood, were my memories, was my whole life simple/uncomplicated/deadly?
Seen from that perspective, then, it's clear to me that my entire adult life was an effort to distance myself from the potential danger exemplified by the simple and uncomplicated. From desserts with three toppings to law school, my every action was aimed at distancing myself from the simple because to be simple was to be dead. Even the "simple" candy I picked for this category was amazingly complex -- it wasn't just sugar and water. There's all kinds of steps and science involved in Rock Candy. In everything I did, as I grew up, I piled on layer and layer of complexity to make sure that I moved away from simple, moved away from dead.
Then, at the last minute, my subconcious reared up, making me select Pixie Sticks as a subconscious way of telling me: it's okay to be simple. It's okay to be plain. Maybe that's why Pixie Sticks suddenly popped into my mind as I began to write this. Maybe my mind is crying out to me that I should decomplicate my life, that I should step back, that I should recapture some of the innocence that my life has lost...
... that, or Pixie Sticks just taste really good.
Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!
Nostalgia Mug:
Want a free t-shirt? Of course you do. Click there to find out how you can get one courtesy of The Best of Everything: Our Opinions Are Righter Than Yours.
Ever wonder who will win in a fight? What fight? ANY fight! My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad will tell you.
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